A
storm is brewing and it is threatening to blow all the Flying Monkeys
back to OZ. Meteorologists and Neocons alike are similarly concerned
that TS Issac, currently gathering strength near Haiti, will gain speed
and make landfall near Tampa on Monday, just as the Conservative Clowns
are pitching their tents in preparation for the Big Top circus.

"Tampa is a very low-lying city and it wouldn't take a major hurricane
to cause significant problems. You can be sure that the attention this
storm is going to receive will be exponentially larger than the actually
storm. In our twitterized world, every radar image, satellite photo and
new track will be analyzed and reanalyzed 100 times over."

Republican pundits have mixed feelings about Isaac. On the one hand
it's a welcome distraction from the Todd Akin "legitimate rape" debacle
and reminder that VP wannabe Paul Ryan walks hand-in-hand with Akin's
idiotic anti-woman policies. On the other hand, they're facing a
possible natural disaster that might, um, land houses on all their
sisters.

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You have to wonder if Isaac causes serious damage, will this crop of
compassionate conservatives make pithy comments to the victims of this
storm as they did when Katrina battered New Orleans? Will Tom Delay
crawl out of his hidey-hole to ask the now-homeless children if they're
having fun in their new shelters, because it's like "going to camp"?
Will Brunhilda Barbara Bush pile her wrinkles into a forced
smile and purr that the victims are really better off now because they
were living in such shabby conditions anyway?

Will House Majority Leader Eric Cantor recant his Ayn Rand-inspired vow to deny states Federal disaster relief monies if a slew of his own are impacted by the fury of wind and water?

But I digress ...

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There is a good possibility the storm will shift to the west and
wreak no more havoc than a strong thunderstorm on the Tampa Bay area.
But that trajectory could spell another kind of disaster, with
consequences more dire than merely loosening the hairpieces off a few
blowhard Teabaggers.

Corporate media is designed as an amnesiac, making us forget all the
serious nastiness of the recent past by filling our brains with inane
quasi-news of golf organizations admitting women to their boy's club, or
presidential birth certificates, so it's difficult to remember all the
seriously nasty, unresolved problems that lie just below the surface of
our lives (or our waters), waiting to do perilous damage.

What happens, dear Truthseekers, if Isaac hits the Deepwater Horizon-infected waters of the Gulf?

BP execs and their mouthpieces in Washington assure that the
dispersants they applied broke the oil into appetizer-sized morsels,
then oil-hungry microbes simply gobbled up the 200 million barrels of
crude that expanded in billowy plumes, blanketing the sea floor in 3,850
square miles of toxic ooze. Many doubt the veracity of this assertion,
especially given the oil company's historical flaunting of government
regulations despite repeated code violations and general lack of honesty
in regards to safety measures and drilling practices.

"Unified Area Command, the joint government-BP body formed to oversee the spill response, came out with a fat report that
seemed expressly designed to close the book on the disaster. Mike
Utsler, BP's Unified Area Commander, summed up its findings like this: 'The beaches are safe, the water is safe, and the seafood is safe.'
Never mind that just four days earlier, more than 8,000 pounds of tar
balls were collected on Florida's beaches -- and that was an average day.
Or that gulf residents and clean-up workers continue to report serious
health problems that many scientists believe are linked to dispersant
and crude oil exposure.

"According to experiments performed by scientists at the University of
South Florida, there is good reason for alarm. When it was out in the
gulf in August (of 2010), the WeatherBird II collected water
samples from multiple locations. Back at the university lab, John Paul, a
professor of biological oceanography, introduced healthy bacteria and
phytoplankton to those water samples and watched what happened. What he
found shocked him. In water from almost half of the locations, the
responses of the organisms "were genotoxic or mutagenic" -- which means the
oil and dispersants were not only toxic to these organisms but caused
changes to their genetic makeup. Changes like these could manifest in a
number of ways: tumors and cancers, inability to reproduce, a general
weakness that would make these organisms more susceptible to prey -- or
something way weirder.

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"Paul explained that what was so 'scary' about these results is that
such genetic damage is 'heritable,' meaning the mutations can be passed
on. 'It's something that can stand around for a very long time in the
Gulf of Mexico,' Paul said. 'You may be genetically altering populations
of fish, or zooplankton, or shrimp, or commercially important
organisms.' Is the turtle population going to have more tumors on them?
We really don't know. And it'll take three to five years to actually get
a handle on that."

Can you imagine what fresh hell could be unleashed if Isaac whips the
mutant muck into an inky soup? One problem with predicting the scope of
such an event is that deep ocean waters are still a final frontier of
science; scant research is available on the nature of the ecology of the
ocean's depths, or what biochemical consequences result from the
mixture of oil, seawater, and dispersants.

Corexit was the chief chemical employed by BP to cover-up their
crime, dumping 1.8 million gallons of the stuff into the Gulf, and its
effects on lower life forms is now under investigation, as reported by ABC News:

Kathy never expected a career in radio as a talk show producer. Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Kathy was completing her nursing degree when in 2001 - in an emergency - she was asked to fill in as the producer of Mike's program. Within a few (more...)